


Gehenna

by SophiaCatherine



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Heist, Introspection, M/M, Pyromania
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 22:21:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14066826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/pseuds/SophiaCatherine
Summary: On a hill overlooking Coast City, there’s a city dump on fire.(Len watches Mick watching fire.)





	Gehenna

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: coldwave, “I’m going to marry you one day.”

On a hill overlooking Coast City, there’s a city dump on fire.

They’re still new at this, a novice Len running an unseasoned crew. But Mick had followed the plan beautifully. The old mansion had gone up in a tower of smoke behind them, and they were halfway to the coast before anyone raised the alarm with the vacationing owners. The crew swept a dozen paintings away with them, an $80,000 Renoir among them.

“What do you want to do now?” Len had asked Mick, after the dog days of debriefing, when they were alone again.

Mick was sparking. His hands shook and his temper flared, erupting as quickly as it was extinguished. Still, Len didn’t know if he would ask.

There’s a sea wind blowing up from the coast, frigid and damp. The dump reeks of rejection.

Len pulls his coat tight around him and sprawls against a crumbling refrigerator. He watches, captivated, as Mick builds the bonfire with expert skill and sharp focus, a master craftsman at work. A single match in the abyss; a spark rises, then another; the pile of trash flares into a rainbow of light and heat.

Mick has settled in as near to the blaze as he can stand, huddled down with half-closed eyes. Len stays at the edges, curbing the urge to curl up next to Mick in the firelight. This is not a cozy hearth. They’re not some old married couple.

The flickering glow lights up Mick’s face, dancing across it and dying away, over and over. He reaches out towards the fire, lets his hand hover above the heat, a little too close for Len’s comfort. For a moment, he’s incandescent, a blazing angel with fire dancing on his hands and in his eyes. Then he’s just Mick again.

The higher the fire rages, the calmer Mick becomes.

Len can’t look away.

He feels his foot fretting, fidgeting against the clutter he’s sitting on. His shoelace catches on a jagged edge and splits apart. He sighs at the tattered mess and reaches down, pulling the shoelace out and flinging it onto the pyre.

Enthralled by his flames, Mick doesn’t react.

Len doesn’t know if it’s a good peace, that flickering calm of Mick’s moment in the fire. It won’t last long afterwards. Everything broken about Mick will rekindle. It’s never really extinguished.

Still, he wonders, not for the first time, what Mick sees when he looks into a flame. And whether anything could give Len even that much peace.

Quietly, with no prelude, Mick says, “I’m gonna marry you one day.”

Len allows no sign of his racing heart to show on his face. He leans a little more casually against the refrigerator. Raises an eyebrow. Grants a small, sardonic smile. “You think they’ll ever let us?”

Mick shrugs. “Guys? Sure, one day,” he says with an absolute certainty that Len envies. “Criminals? Nah.” He laughs, tearing his gaze from the fire for a moment, and turning it on Len with the same intensity. “You could make it work. Take us somewhere they don’t know us. Or, I dunno - erase our records.”

Len chuckles quietly, reverently. “If I ever manage that, it’s a deal.”

He looks away, and he can see it suddenly. Him and Mick, running crews in their 30s. Running whole cities in their 50s. The things they could do.

Then he shakes it off. They’ll be lucky to make it to 25, the way they’re living now. Aiming for the sun is dangerous for people like them. They’ll catch alight.

But he’d do anything to see Mick look at him with that searing ferocity again, no matter how long it lasted.

He turns back to Mick, who’s already lost in the fire again.

Len glances around. In the ebbing light, the place is empty except for them. He takes a step closer to the fire, and another. Mick doesn’t look up, but he shifts a little to the left, making room for Len.

They sit there, into the night, as the fire burns down from dazzling blaze to dying glow.

They’ll leave the embers smouldering behind them soon. They’ll go back to a cold motel room, then months lying low in dingy warehouses and dank squats.

But right now, for a brief moment of respite in a world that doesn’t want them, they burn.

**Author's Note:**

> I love comments and always reply!
> 
> (Gehenna: the "burning place" - a valley where human sacrifices by fire were made to the the gods, and an early name of the destination of the wicked after death, in some Jewish and Christian beliefs.)
> 
> Thanks to @elithespaceace on tumblr for beta-ing this for me.
> 
> On tumblr [here](https://sophiainspace.tumblr.com/)


End file.
